4. Using the System Information utility
The Device Manager utility provides you with a way to view and manipulate your hardware and the enabling software drivers.
It’s a read/write utility in that you can make changes to the system.
However, that might be more than you need. Sometimes, you just need to
view a lot of information all at once, even if you cannot make changes
to the information. That’s where the System Information utility is useful.
The System Information utility displays a plethora of information
about your system that is read-only. You can’t change any of the
information. By using this utility, you can view details about hardware
resources, system components, and the software environment.
To access the System Information utility, type msinfo32
on the Start screen, and then tap or click the resulting entry.
Viewing conflicting or shared resources
With Device Manager, identifying resource
conflicts or identifying devices that are sharing resources requires
you to open details for every device. In the System Information
utility, identifying these situations is as easy as selecting System
Summary, Hardware Resources, and then Conflicts/Sharing. As you can see
in Figure 16, the System Information utility makes it easier to see this information.
Note that resource sharing and conflicts are not necessarily bad
things. A number of years ago, administrators had to make sure that
resource sharing never occurred, but modern systems use limited system
resources much more efficiently by sharing these resources when it
makes sense to do so.
System Information highlights
So much information is available in this utility that it’s not
possible to show everything in just a few pages. Take the time to
review the System
Information utility and get familiar with it. It contains a lot of
information that you will find useful. Highlights of the utility are
shown in Table 1.
Table 3-1. The System Information utility
|
Path |
Description |
|---|
|
Components, Network, Adapter |
Displays a list of all the network adapters installed in the system
along with all the configuration information related to each adapter,
including IP address, DHCP lease information, adapter model, and MAC
address |
|
Components, Problem Devices |
Displays a list of the devices that are currently experiencing some kind of problem and that need attention |
|
Software Environment, Network Connections |
Displays a list of network resources to which the local system is connected |
|
Software Environment, Running Tasks |
Displays a list of all running tasks along with the full path to the
related executable, the process ID, software version, and size |
|
Software Environment, Environment Variables |
Displays a list of all the environment variables that have been created on the system |
